No matter what life throws at you, it's always nice to know you can escape into the dark. Especially when they're great, even when they're bad ... they're the movies, after all.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

"The Lovers"

☆☆☆½

Their house looks like all the others, and so, Mary and Michael have come to realize, do their lives. Not that they would ever go to a party, but if they did and they were asked how they met, they might look at each other quizzically and wonder why they can't remember that detail.

But their tidy, beige home with its tidy earth-toned furniture isn't where we first meet either of them, because they try to spend as little time there as they can. Mary is having an affair with a vaguely handsome writer, and she gets a little giddy because it's forbidden. Michael is having an affair with a vaguely pretty ballet teacher, and he gets a little giddy because it's forbidden.

During the day, each of them escapes a drab, cubicle-bound existence to spend time with a lover. It's quite likely Mary has figured out Michael's affair, and vice-versa, but neither one of them has an inclination to say anything because of that beige house and earth-toned life. Both of them are sure of one thing: As soon as their son comes home from college to visit, they are going to reveal their secret lives to the family and start anew.

But as they head toward this fixed-date destiny, something happens. Affairs, it turns out, work both ways, and Mary and Michael start to realize that they can cheat on their secret lovers with ... each other. And they can like it. Their own marriage becomes something vaguely dangerous, something mildly passionate.

The Lovers is a small movie about small lives, but treats the predicament of a frumpy, sedate middle-aged couple with respect, humor and a rather stunning amount of style. Director Azael Jacobs has that sharp-edged independent spirit, but brings a dark, shimmering hue to the film, both visually and audibly, through a lush and striking score by Mandy Hoffman, which provides a rich, flowing counterpart to the stillness of the movie and its characters -- they may be stuck in their lives, but the film's grand music takes them soaring in a way their own hearts can't express.

It's an odd film, not for all tastes, with a strange pace that is as morose as Mary and Michael to begin with, but builds and builds into a third act that brings an unexpected emotional suspense along with an ending that proves to be a clever surprise.

As Mary, Debra Winger makes a welcome return to the big screen in a rare kind of role -- not at all glamorous but hinting at a secret aspiration to passion, a return to the kind of life she hoped for but never got. Winger finds a delicate middle-ground for Mary that's somewhere between exhaustion and optimism.

Tracy Letts, best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of August: Osage County, is Michael, Mary's fair-haired, big-bellied and droopy husband who is as surprised as she is that he's still stuck in the cubicle, still paying the mortgage, still coasting along. He seems more drab as a character until a third-act revelation that thoroughly reframes his character -- and hers, too.

He drops the minor bombshell on the girlfriend of his visiting son, who imagines, rightly, that his father is a philanderer but has never considered his mother as anything but the put-upon spouse. Tyler Ross is angst-ridden and angry as the son, and he's fine, as is Jessica Sula as his curious girlfriend. The only real trouble spot among the actors is Melora Walters as Michael's fidgety, anxious, emotionally frail girlfriend. If it's easy to see why Mary might have fallen for her more soulful writer (Aiden Gillen), it's downright impossible to know what Michael sees in a woman who comes across as emotionally needy and vindictive.

Yet maybe that's the point. Maybe we can't possibly know what they could see in other people, much less in each other -- because, The Lovers discovers, they don't really know themselves. The Lovers is a clever reminder that Tolstoy was only half right: Yes, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but Mary and Michael make you wonder: Is any family, or any couple, really ever completely happy? Isn't marriage mostly a struggle to make it through the difficult moments and find a way toward a kind of self-centered form of happiness?

The path toward that sort of happiness twists and turns in unusual ways. The lovers in TheLovers do their best to navigate it, difficult and hazardous as it may be.Viewed May 13, 2017 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks1910

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About Me

I'm lucky enough to make my living within the entertainment industry, and have never lost my passion for movies. Quite apart from my "day job, " I created this job to share my thoughts on movies ... and encourage yours. No matter what life throws at you, it's always nice to know you can escape into the movies. Especially when they're great, even when they're bad ... they're the movies, after all.